It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world. Expecting m...ore novelty than there is, more greatness than there is, and more strangeness than there is, we imagine ourselves masters of a plastic universe. But a world we can shape to our will ... is a shapeless world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

I grew up confidently expecting to have a profession and earn my own living, and also confidently expecting to be married and have... children. It was fifty-fifty with me. I was just as passionately determined to have children as I was to have a career. And my mother was the triumphant answer to all doubts as to the success of this double role. From my earliest memory she had more than half supported the family and yet she was supremely a mother.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Gaining a better understanding of how children's minds work at different ages will allow you to make more sense of their behaviors.... With this understanding come decreased stress and increased pleasure from being a parent. It lessens the frustrations that come from expecting things that a child simply cannot do or from incorrectly interpreting a child's behavior in adult terms.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Gradually I regained my usual composure. I reread Pale Fire more carefully. I liked it better when expecting less. And what was th...at? What was that dim distant music, those vestiges of color in the air? Here and there I discovered in it and especially, especially in the invaluable variants, echoes and spangles of my mind, a long ripplewake of my glory.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Mother love has been much maligned. An over mothered boy may go through life expecting each new woman to love him the way his moth...er did. Her love may make any other love seem inadequate. But an unloved boy would be even more likely to idealize love. I don't think it's possible for a mother or father to love a child too much.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

As our boys and men are all expecting to be Presidents, so our girls and women must all hold themselves in readiness to preside in... the White House; and in no city in the world can honest industry be more at a discount than in this capital of the government of the people.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The heroes and discoverers have found true more than was previously believed, only when they were expecting and dreaming of someth...ing more than their contemporaries dreamed of, or even themselves discovered, that is, when they were in a frame of mind fitted to behold the truth. Referred to the world's standard, they are always insane. Even savages have indirectly surmised as much.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Whatever we do we must do confidently (if we are timid, let us, then, act timidly), not expecting more light, but having light eno...ugh. It we confidently expect more, then let us wait for it. But what is this which we have? Have we not already waited? Is this the beginning of time? Is there a man who does not see clearly beyond, though only a hair's breadth beyond where he at any time stands?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

During those years in Stamps, I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare. He was my first white love.... it was Shakespeare w...ho said, "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes." It was a state of mind with which I found myself most familiar. I pacified myself about his whiteness by saying that after all he had been dead so long it couldn't matter to anyone any more.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »